Gaming evolves

Sunday sees the launch of the latest game by influential designer Will Wright. ‘Spore’, published by Electronic Arts (EA) allows players follow the evolution of a creature from primordial soup all the way to space exploration. Fond of claiming that he develops ‘software toys’ rather than games, Wright has previously modelled city planning, ant farms and mars colonies -- and even ordinary human social life, in the massively-successful game ‘The Sims’. The Sims was credited with opening the market significantly to female gamers (and generating more than a billion dollars in revenue in the process).

If the subject of games is maturing, so too is the industry. Though users still tweak games and provide extra content, the days in which they developed whole games in bedrooms and garages are passing. A typical title for the Playstation 3 console cost 15 million dollars to develop in 2007, triple the cost of three years ago, while revenues have remained constant. Spore might have cost 50 milllion dollars to develop, exclusive of marketing expenses. Such costs (and the need to be able to absorb failure if a title flops) have encouraged consolidation in the industry, creating behemoths like EA and Activision-Vivendi. EA is hoping to buy out ‘Take Two’, the publisher of the successful ‘Grand Theft Auto’ games.

Still, size does not guarantee success, since larger firms have a reputation for stifling the creativity of their acquisitions. EA has a reputation, too, for trading off endless sequels to its games, especially high-profile sporting titles, and such an approach is generating shrinking returns.  Alternative business models have excited interest, putting games middlemen such as EA at risk much as record companies have been, by getting creators to sell directly to consumers. The developer Valve has attempted to by-pass publishers in exactly this way, via the online payments system ‘Steam’. Unless they can continue to deliver massive hits, like Grand Theft Auto or Spore perhaps, big publishers may be threatened with extinction in the long term.